


Of Note

by taispeantas_laethuil



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Declarations Of Love, M/M, Romance, communication issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 07:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6647926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taispeantas_laethuil/pseuds/taispeantas_laethuil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Bull and Dorian are something, even if they can't verbalize what they are yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Note

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Koutou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koutou/gifts).



It was a weird urge, when first he had it. It didn’t make the slightest bit of sense, so he tried to put it aside.

It kept coming back, like one of those little annoying yappy dogs that always tried to pick a fight with Rocky whenever he came into their sight, until finally one night, Dorian paused in the midst of fussing with his hair, and asked “Is everything alright?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” the Bull replied.

Dorian went back to his fussing- or, at least, made the appearance of doing so. The Bull was pretty sure he wasn’t actually doing anything. “It’s just- it seems as though you’ve been worrying a bit, of late.”

“Not really,” the Bull said with a shrug.

Dorian continued fake-fussing. “You can speak to me, you know,” he offered. “I could- that is, many people consider me to be quite clever. Perhaps I might be able to spot a solution to whatever troubles you.”

The Bull snorted, because it was expect of him. “Many people, hm?”

“This is one of those rare occasions on which I can be lumped in with many people, I admit,” Dorian retorted.

“It’s not something I can really talk about,” the Bull said.

Dorian nodded, and accepted the answer, like the Bull knew he would. Dorian, he was beginning to realize, wasn’t particularly demanding when it came to emotional stuff. He’d asked a couple straightforward questions, when it became obvious that they were going to go to bed on the regular, and hadn’t pushed since.

It made the Bull a little uncomfortable, because it was obvious that Dorian wanted more than what they had, and well- the Bull liked giving people what they wanted. It made him feel like he was doing well. Like he was being good. Like he had a worthwhile purpose to fulfill.

But he had no way of pushing, and there was always the chance that Dorian wanted more, but not with him, which kind of left him stuck.

“Well. I’m available as a distraction, should that help,” Dorian offered.

Yeah, it did. Or it would, if he wasn’t right at the center of it.

The urge struck the Bull again, and this time he let it carry him. Dorian wouldn’t understand the significance of it, so it would exert no pressure on him. It had to beat being stuck.

“Yeah, actually,” the Bull said, sitting up. “Do you mind if I try something?”

Dorian snuck a look out the (now-curtainless) windows to see how close it was to being dawn. Force of habit: everyone knew they were fucking by now. Leaving before the watch change wouldn’t make a lick of difference.

The Bull wasn’t comfortable calling him out on that, though, which left this.

“No,” Dorian replied cautiously. “So long as it’s within reason.”

The Bull wasn’t sure about reasonable, but it wasn’t going to hurt anything either.

Dorian sat back down on the bed and watched as the Bull leaned over the footboard and opened the trunk where he kept all his bedroom toys. His arched an eyebrow when he saw the kind of rope the Bull had extracted: in a shade of blue so dark that in most lights it appeared black, and much thinner than most every other kind of rope they used, around the same girth as Sera’s sweater yarn, though a lot tougher than anything she used. Normally the Bull wound that around his cock, when the name of the game was ‘you don’t come until I let you’.

They weren’t playing any kind of games here, and even if they were, it wouldn’t be that one.

Dorian let the Bull take his right wrist and looped the string around it, and then around his forearm. He watched silently for a time, as the Bull began to weave his way back and forth along his arm, pausing to make knots every so often.

“Is this some sort of string figure?” he asked finally. “A cat’s cradle? A spider’s grandmother?”

“Not really,” the Bull answered, not looking up from the quipu. “Call it a reminder.”

“A reminder for what?” Dorian asked. “To tie me up later?”

The Bull hummed, and raised his face a little so Dorian could see his smirk. “Guess you’ll just have to come back later and find out.”

Dorian sniffed, but the rejoinder about presumption he’d been expecting didn’t come out. Instead, the Bull finished the quipu he was working on without Dorian’s usual accompanying bluster.

Dorian still left after he was done, but he left with a kiss and a “I’ll see you later, then.”

* * *

Dorian was still wearing the quipu when he showed up that night. The Bull didn’t remove it when he tied Dorian down, or when he untied him when they were done.

It had no significance to Dorian, but it did to the Bull. He wanted to enjoy it while he still could.

Dorian kept it on for far longer than the Bull ever expected him too. Days and weeks and months. He didn’t bathe with it on: the dye in the rope never ran, and when the Bull could take a close look at it, he could see that Dorian had loosened the knots around either end of it, so that he could slip it off. That meant that he was choosing deliberately to keep putting it on, and that he was taking it off only to prevent damage to it.

The Bull was oddly touched by that. He’d been expecting that Dorian wouldn’t understand the significance, and he’d been right. He still didn’t have a clue. But he’d found meaning in the Bull giving him the quipu, and found that to be worth preserving. That was downright sentimental, and the Bull felt a little lighter whenever he thought about it.

In the end, it took falling into the Fade for Dorian to stop wearing it. The Bull wasn’t sure if he’d physically lost it or had just decided to take it off: he’d been wearing it when they said their goodbyes, and it’d been gone when they returned to Skyhold and had a minute to themselves. In the end, he wasn’t sure if it mattered whether Dorian had chosen its removal. He started leaping out of bed right after they’d finished again, and that wasn’t anything but his choice.

The Bull accepted it. And if he felt unhappy about it, then it was just one more thing to have Krem and Cassandra and the boss beat out of him with the feelings stick.

* * *

There was a new merchant that arrived in Skyhold, and the boss wanted him to check him out. A Tal-Vashoth merchant who came bearing genuine Qunari-made goods that had been sold during the Arishok’s stay in Kirkwall, or so he claimed. Lavellan just wanted his opinion as to whether or not that was likely to be the truth.

So far, the Bull was pretty sure that the only lie was that all of his goods were genuine Qunari products. The bed was clearly made by Orlesians: ditto the throne. Some of his armor was, though most of it was replicas, or at least, makeshift armor that the Antaam stuck in Kirkwall had tried to create on their own. His horses were from genuine Asaarash stock, and even the younger horses were trained in that manner. Probably the guy had been an Arvaarash, back before he’d gone rogue and started calling himself Talon.

The guy himself, though? Harmless. Just another quasi-honest merchant trying to make some money off of the end of the world, rather than going bankrupt because of it.

Still, the Bull lingered and kept an eye on him, because in addition to being harmless the guy was hot. He had a tall, lean build, almost willowy until he had to lift something up: then you could see the play of muscles beneath his skin. Unlike many Qunari, his skin was copper rather than silver, and he had so many bronze freckles all over that at first glance he’d taken it as vitaar. Talon wore a shirt, a deep v-neck that teased more than it showed, and left him more than a little curious to see just how far down his freckles went.

Judging by the way Dorian was looking at him, he wasn’t alone in that thought. Maybe now was a good time to bring up threesomes.

Or, the Bull amended, watching the two of them as they went deeper and deeper into whatever conversation they were having over the armor he’d brought with them, to remind him that he was allowed to sleep with other people. Not that he seemed to need the reminder.

They’d agreed to that. It was one of the pointed questions Dorian had asked, back when their regular fucking was still a new item on the agenda. _Are we going to be exclusive?_ He hadn’t seen a point to pressing that, hadn’t thought it to be something Dorian needed. Just because the Bull hadn’t slept around in- since they’d started didn’t mean that Dorian had to alter their rules.

He was kind of surprised when Dorian showed up that night. Surprised, but certainly not complaining. It was a state that held when Dorian didn’t do more than stretch languidly on his bed when they were finished.

“Do you mind if I stay the night?” he asked. “The weather’s supposed to be abominable tonight.”

Skyhold had its own bubble of temperate weather that acted independently of the rest of the Frostbacks. It would stay clear and warm and dry when there were blizzards elsewhere, and sometimes, when the rest of the mountain was having a sunny day, it would rain inside in the keep. Weather was a really terrible excuse, even before you factored in the hole in his ceiling, and they both knew it.

“Not at all,” the Bull said.

* * *

“Do you mind if I try something?” Dorian asked.

The Bull couldn’t imagine that he would, which lead to sitting down at the little newly cleared-off table in Dorian’s room. The Bull could see some of the papers and books that had previously been piled on it peeking out from under his bed as Dorian wiped down his arm with a steaming moist towel.

“Now, hold still,” Dorian instructed, setting his arm down on the table, the inside of his wrist facing up. “Or you’ll ruin the pattern.”

Dorian was using a blunted quill sticking out of a small oilskin sack to apply the henna, probably the closest thing to a real henna cone he could come up with this far south. It was probably hard enough, coming up with the henna itself.

“You didn’t raid the boss’ hair dye stash, did you?” the Bull asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dorian scoffed. “I won it in a card game- from Josephine, I’ll have you know.”

The Bull doubted that. He doubted that Josephine had lost to Dorian fair and square, and doubted that Dorian could get his cheating past her. That meant that Josephine needed a way of disposing of this henna, and for some reason didn’t want to just throw it out- he’d thought the boss looked like she’d gone back to the sorrel and beet juice dye she’d been using in Haven recently.

It probably had something to do with the way they were headed for Halamshiral and the Winter Palace next week. There were more Orlesians around nowadays than there had been before, and he didn’t think it was because most of the heavy renovations were done. Someone probably was going through their trash, and dyed hair might be out of fashion in Court. He’d have to check with Ma’am later, and see if he was right.

He watched Dorian apply it with practiced, precise movements, a pattern of interlocking circles and dots taking shape. Bull had seen similar patterns on buildings on Seheron, the ones the Vints had built before Koslun walked the land and no one had seen fit to destroy since.

“Do this often?” he asked.

“Not recently,” Dorian replied, not looking up from his work. “The art was invented in Qarinus, I’ll have you know. And Felix was a bit of an enthusiast.”

“A henna enthusiast?” the Bull asked.

“A _charioteer_ enthusiast,” Dorian scoffed. “He was utterly enamored with the White-and-Greens. I’ll never understand why. The Black-and-Golds are clearly superior in every respect.”

“Clearly,” the Bull said with a laugh. He only had a vague idea about chariot racing in the Imperium, and Dorian probably had guessed that. “What’s that got to do with henna?”

“People would get henna done all over their bodies and then expose themselves in an attempt to distract the drivers or in celebration or whatever,” Dorian explained. “I accompanied Felix the grand opening at the Capitoline one season, turned my back on him for perhaps ten minutes to have a bit of a flirt, and then turned back around to find that he was half-naked outside the henna stand, and the artist and her apprentices had done up his face and were working their way down his arms and torso. I couldn’t believe it. Ten minutes! Ten minutes, that was all it took. I had us sneak back into the estate through the kitchens so we could try scrubbing it off before Gereon could see, and then we ran into a cook who- well. That’s actually not a very good story, come to think of it.”

“Oh?” the Bull asked.

“Well, the cook at the Alexius’ house was very nearsighted. She saw Felix had lines all over his face and assumed he was a new member of the staff. A new slave.” Dorian still hadn’t looked up from his work, but it was definitely because he was trying to avoid his eyes. “I don’t recall even seeing any Dalish being held at the Alexius Estate. That was just- the prevailing association.”

Dorian was silent for a moment.

“At any rate, I took over doing Felix’s henna after that,” he continued. “I attempted to persuade him to dress less obnoxiously too, but that turned out to be a lost cause.”

He finished up whatever pattern he’d been making and carefully set the henna aside.

“Moment of truth,” he said, waggling his fingers above the Bull’s arm. “May I?”

The Bull nodded, and Dorian did something magical that made his skin tingle and the henna on it dry and crack, revealing the rust-colored stains on his skin.

“I must confess,” Dorian murmured, gently brushing the dried paste away. “I wasn’t sure that would take.”

Dorian’s bed was a little too small for the pair of them, but they made it work.

* * *

Krem noticed of course.

“What’s your Altus written on you?” he asked.

“Hmm?” the Bull replied through his bacon and eggs.

“Writing,” Krem said, jabbing him in the wrist. “In the Old Tongue.”

The Bull swallowed. “Oh?”

“Yeah. The really fancy shit they have on Chantries, that Soporati like me aren’t permitted to learn,” Krem elaborated. “What’s it say?”

The Bull shrugged.

“He did tell you, right Chief?” Krem asked, his eyes narrowed.

“That wasn’t really a talking night,” the Bull hedged.

Krem didn’t buy it for a second, but he let it drop. “It better not say ‘property of Dorian Pavus’ or something like that,” he grumbled.

The Bull didn’t think that was what it meant for a second, but it did leave the question- what had Dorian written?

The first step to finding out was to make sure that he had the writing to refer back too. Now that they’d been to Halamshiral and its heavily-perfumed baths the stains were beginning to fade. He could have just copied the markings down on paper, but that felt wrong, somehow. He traced them with vitaar instead, using his thinnest brush to preserve the lines.

Even if he never found out what they said, it was worth it for the way Dorian looked at him that first time he saw what the Bull had done.

The second step was to find a book he could use to translate the shit on his arm. That was a little more difficult- Dorian was still trying to trace Corypheus’ lineage, and was snapping up every even halfway passable book about Ancient Tevinter. He had to enlist the aid of the bookseller, paying her extra to keep it quiet. He told her it was a gift for Dorian. It wasn’t exactly untrue. He’d be happy to give three-volume dictionary she provided him with to him, once he was done using it.

Once he had what he needed, it didn’t take long for him to translate it; but once he’d translated it, he couldn’t believe it. He tried again and again, checking his work to make sure he wasn’t making a mistake.

As far as he could tell, he wasn’t.

He scooped up the books and brought them with him to the library. They made a loud thunk when he dropped them on Dorian’s desk, waking him from his doze.

“Bull, what-?”

“How did you know?” he asked, pointing to his arm.

Dorian shook the sleep out of his head, all tiredness gone as his eyes as they darted between the Bull’s wrist and the dictionaries. “Ah,” he said.

“How did you know?” the Bull repeated. “You threw it out, you couldn’t have-”

“I didn’t throw it out!” Dorian protested. “I didn’t want to- it felt like- the temptation was- I stopped wearing it, but I didn’t _throw it out_.”

“How did you even know it meant something?” the Bull asked.

“That merchant- Talon, remember? He had his patter about the meanings behind the knots on the armor he was selling. I asked him for a translation.”

“And then did some translating of your own.”

There’s no such thing as a perfect translation. That what his besrathari had said when he was in training, and it was true. Words had different subtexts and associations in different cultures, let alone different languages: concepts were given different weights and priorities.

Still.

If he were to translate what they’d written- what he had tied to Dorian’s arm and Dorian had stained into his skin- into Trade, he’d put it like this: _you are my center, when all else is a storm; you are my heart, and I cherish that gift._

There wasn’t a lot of ambiguity with that. Not even in Qunlat, where love was a dangerous disease; not even in Tevene, where love was a dangerous fairytale.

“You could have told me,” the Bull said.

“You could have told me,” Dorian snapped back.  “You could have-” He stopped, abruptly, and then laughed, a dry, breathless chuckle. “We make quite a pair, don’t we amatus?”

“Yeah, kadan,” the Bull said. “Yeah, we do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Koutou prompted me with "Dorian surprising the Bull" ages and ages ago, and somehow this barely-relevant fic came forth.


End file.
